NVIDIA Pushes Out 195.22 Beta Linux Driver

After talking about NVIDIA's forthcoming 64-bit FreeBSD driver we were alerted to the fact that the first 195.xx public beta driver is now available. Earlier this month we first talked about the NVIDIA Linux 195.xx driver series as Fermi GT 300 support was being worked on, but now a Fermi-less (or at least from their official change-log) driver has arrived. This driver is at version 195.22 and brings several changes to the Linux front.

Further enriching VDPAU continues to be a core focus of NVIDIA's developers and with the 195.22 release there are enhancements to the VDPAU blit-based presentation queue, updated VDPAU to improve thread concurrency (this could help the GStreamer-Cairo developers, modified the install location of the VDPAU libraries (see the recent libvdpau release), a define for VDPAU_INTERFACE_VERSION, and a fix for a periodic temporary hang in the VDPAU blit-based presentation queue. The main new feature for VDPAU though with the 195.xx series is that the Video Decode and presentation API for Unix now allows multiple streams to be decoded at once.

Other changes include support for R16F and RG32F GLXFBConfigs (with GeForce 8 hardware and later), support for NVIDIA 3D Vision Stereo on Linux with Quadro GPUs, support for A2BGR10 32-bit GLX visuals on 30-bit X screens, fixes for some DisplayPort monitors that were mistakenly put in a DPMS power savings mode, and changes to the glXSwapBuffers() behavior. The NVIDIA 195.xx driver release will now also work with the Apple Cinema 24" LED displays and some other DisplayPort monitors that previously had problems with NVIDIA's binary driver.

The full change-log with NVIDIA Linux x86/x86_64 driver download links is available at NvNews.net.